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A Presidential pardon, like sainthood, must be assiduously pursued in order to be obtained, but not openly desired. Last Monday, when Rudy Giuliani received a remarkably broad pardon from Donald Trump, a spokesperson for the former Mayor said that his client had “never sought a pardon but is deeply grateful for President Trump’s decision.” Giuliani’s pardon was among more than seventy issued in a batch, many of them blanket prophylactic measures for Trump’s allies in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, including the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the lawyers John Eastman and Sidney Powell—none of whom face federal charges. On the same day, the White House announced that Trump had pardoned dozens of other people, including a congresswoman’s pharmacist husband, who distributed a dialysis drug from China that had not been approved by the F.D.A.; an ultra-runner who took a quick detour on a protected Grand Teton trail; and the former Mets star Darryl Strawberry, for his conviction on a tax-evasion charge. That list had some of the feeling of the bestowal of the King’s birthday honors, except that nearly everyone on it had been charged with a federal crime.

Histories of the pardon power tend to begin with Hammurabi and flow through the centuries (James II once sold a reprieve for sixteen thousand pounds), and it is a rare feature of monarchical power which the Founders adopted in the Constitution. A modern case for the measure, articulated by the Oxford philosopher Adam Perry, is that, when laws are broadly fair but unfair in a particular instance, pardons allow for “selective deviation.” Sometimes the pardon power has been used as a corrective, when the social consensus behind a particular law has changed but sentences endure: Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers, and Joe Biden cleared the names of several thousand Americans convicted of federal marijuana crimes. Yet entrusting a President to select when to deviate from the law tends to lead to a friends-and-family approach, as when Bill Clinton pardoned the billionaire Marc Rich, who had fled the country before facing charges, or when Biden exempted his son Hunter from charges brought by his own Department of Justice. Pardons can become a shortcut to a separate system of justice.

But Trump, in his second term, has begun to expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale. This spring, he fired Liz Oyer, a career official in charge of the pardon office, after she refused to recommend reinstating gun-ownership rights to Mel Gibson. Trump then appointed a keen loyalist, Ed Martin, to lead the office. A kind of pardon economy has bloomed: in May, the Wall Street Journal reported that pardon seekers were “shelling out to hire lawyers and lobbyists who tout access to those in the president’s inner circle.” In March,Trump pardoned an electric-truck entrepreneur named Trevor Milton, who was convicted on fraud charges. The President said that Milton had been “highly recommended” to him by “top-of-the-line people”; Milton had also contributed to Trump’s and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s campaigns.

“No maga left behind,” Martin tweeted. He seems to mean it: Trump granted two hundred and thirty-eight pardons and commutations in his first term; less than a year into his second, he has issued nearly two thousand. In most cases, of course, the person being pardoned had been found guilty of a crime. The pardon economy presents the possibility that, if you’re nice enough to the President, a jury’s judgment might be set aside. But you have to stay nice: on Newsmax, Trump mused about a potential pardon for Diddy, on his conviction for prostitution-related charges. “I got along with him great,” the President said, “but when I ran for office he was very hostile.” He added, “I’m being honest—it makes it more difficult to do.”

Many of Trump’s pardons have helped him secure political loyalties. He has pardoned more than a thousand people convicted on charges related to the events of January 6th, as well as dozens of fake electors and lawyers who supported those events. But some of the most egregious acts contain a financial element. Last month, Trump pardoned the Chinese Canadian billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who founded the crypto exchange Binance. In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to report the use of the platform by terrorist entities and individuals sanctioned by the U.S. government. This spring, according to the Journal, Binance took steps that boosted the value of a stablecoin developed by World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family has a large stake, including the receipt of a two-billion-dollar investment. (Representatives for both World Liberty Financial and Binance denied that there was any impropriety.) When asked on “60 Minutes” about Zhao’s pardon, Trump said, “O.K., are you ready? I don’t know who he is.”

The ingenuity of Trump’s initiative is that it is explicitly permitted by the Constitution, which states that the President “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” But the power can still be politically entangling. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has generally argued that Trump’s pardons are correcting overzealous prosecutions by the Biden Administration of political enemies and financial upstarts—in effect, claiming that the social consensus has shifted to the right. But Trump’s popularity has declined—it’s forty-one per cent in the Times’ polling average—and this month’s elections went badly for the G.O.P., so the correcting-Biden justification may have less traction.

That could prove particularly true with Trump’s stickiest problem, which he’s lately been calling the “Epstein hoax.” Over the summer, after Justice Department officials had promised to review investigative files on the activities of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse minors. She told Blanche that Trump had always been “a gentleman” and that she’d never seen him in Epstein’s house or “in any type of massage setting.” She was then moved to a minimum-security prison, where she is reportedly preparing an application for commutation, but last week House Democrats released thousands of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate, including some e-mails that appeared to contradict her.

Last week, the White House said that Trump is not considering a pardon for Maxwell, and no wonder. If he were to issue one, it would highlight, in a very public way, the system that he and his subordinates have built: a separate tier of justice for his allies and investors—a legal gray zone for people the President finds useful. ♦

I don’t think I viscerally understood the importance of a Christmas tree, or a Hanukkah menorah, or a St. Lucia’s crown until I moved into an apartment with lots of windows: the night is long and dark out there this time of year, in this part of the world, and adding a little extra light goes an awfully long way toward brightening the mood. It makes sense that the cold months are when we, warm-bodied animals, want to come together, to be celebratory, to affirm and reinvigorate our affections. And what better way than with the exchange of useful, lovely, or absurd objects? Here, for the food-focussed and the culinarily inclined, are some of my favorite things that solve no real or urgent problems but might, in small and surprising ways, make life more enjoyable to live.

I’ve said this before, but it’s as true now as in any other year: if nothing on this list feels right, then what you should probably give your loved one is a cookbook. Drop an e-mail to the good folks at a culinary-specific bookstore, such as Kitchen Arts & Letters, in New York, or Now Serving, in L.A., where the obscenely well-informed staff can recommend an ideal gift based on the recipient’s interests and aspirations. Or, if your giftee’s cookbook stack already teeters too high, try exploring the adjacent category of culinary-art books—recent favorites of mine include the portrait photographer Melanie Dunea’s witty, provocative “Amuse-Bouche” ($295), featuring lithe bodies adorned in radicchio undergarments and octopus-tentacle necklaces, and “Leaked Recipes” ($26), the artist Demetria Glace’s painstaking compilation of all the cooking content that’s been revealed in major data breaches, including the Sony hack, WikiLeaks, and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. All you have to do is wrap them up with a bow.

Enter a Blue Period

Tommaso platter 

$198

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When I first began working in food media, I learned that there was a taboo against cookbooks or cooking-magazine covers that prominently featured the color blue. I remember once asking the creative director of the magazine where I worked why that was: “People just don’t like the way food looks on a blue background,” he replied. Don’t they, though? I think virtually any dish looks stunning when presented against a backdrop the color of the sea or the sky: a pile of bronze-skinned chicken legs on an oceanic Sur La Table stoneware oval ($50), or orange parentheses of roasted squash arranged on Settle Ceramics’ shallow-rimmed circular platter in vivid Yves Klein blue ($165). Wouldn’t it be awfully fun to serve an actual herring on Royal Delft’s herring dish ($329)? Or a spinny orange swirl of spaghetti pomodoro atop Porta’s Tommaso platter, which features sardines in a cerulean sunburst ($198)? I can’t imagine a lovelier color to introduce a bounteous feast.

Utensils with Staying Power

I’ve purged most of my cooking utensils in the past few years, motivated in part by the great black-plastic freakout, and in part by simple ennui. The small group of items that survived the cull are almost all brusquely utilitarian (OXO tongs, $18; a superior design does not exist) or deeply meaningful (a red melamine ladle that my parents owned well before I was born, and which I stole from them twenty years ago, and which I suspect they’ve been looking for ever since). When replacing tools, I’ve looked for designs that will work better than anything else or will last forever. For instance, a sleekly aerodynamic turner spatula (starting from $44), fabricated from a single piece of stainless steel, from the hundred-and-sixty-six-year-old French cutlery producer André Verdier. Or Gestura’s remarkable 01 Silver Spoon ($27), which is brilliantly designed with a deep well to prevent spilling, a tapered point for drizzling, and a flared-out edge for scraping; plus, it holds precisely one tablespoon, for on-the-fly measurement. Given how “tweezer food” has become something of a gastronomic punch line, I’ve been shocked by how I’ve come to rely on a pair of pointed cooking tweezers ($24), for turning small things in a hot pan or fishing out the bouquet garni from a pot of soup, or click-clacking together happily for no reason at all.

The Kids’ Table Is All Right

Talavera mug 

$12.99

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Any virtues sung of kids’ tableware tends to focus on its functional features: its durability, its ease of cleaning, its suction-to-table properties or spill-averting gyrodynamics. What a pleasure, then, to recommend such products on the strength of emotion. I am simply in love with everything made by Anelia Co., a baby brand that translates the shapes and colors of traditional Mexican tableware into kid-proof cups and plates. Its whole suite of items is terrific—such as a barro-inspired silicone set ($28), which includes a plate, a cup, and a lidded bowl that resembles a salsero de barro—but I’m particularly enamored of its collection of toddler talavera mugs ($13 each), a rainbow selection of lidded, soft-handled silicone vessels printed with leafy motifs that evoke the traditional Mexican glazing technique.

Crustacean Decoration

Octopus-motif brooch 

$1,077

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Every season has its own fashionable non-fish sea life—we have been through the hegemony of the decorative shrimp, the reign of the graphic-designed lobster, the era of the octopod. In the spirit of unity and openness, I propose that we fling these trendy follies aside and finally celebrate the magnificent alien beauty of all creatures of the deep. A good start is the work of the artist and jewelry designer Nana Watanabe, who creates stunning, intricately embroidered crabs, shrimp, and other marine invertebrates. Imagine being served your next shrimp cocktail while wearing a pair of enormous iridescent shrimp earrings ($493); hosting your next crab boil in a necklace made of the most beautiful blue crabs you’ve ever seen ($1,693); or pinning an octopus brooch ($1,077) to your shoulder for good luck on your next fishing trip.

Jungian Therapy

Dora Jung, the pioneering Finnish textile artist, treated linen as her painter’s palette. From a studio in Helsinki, from 1932 until her death, in 1980, she spun out work that was, according to one breathless Danish critic, “fantastic, imaginative, emotional, exquisite.” Her “Play of Lines,” woven from impossibly fine linen, put Finland on the design map. She understood that beauty lives in the everyday, that a tablecloth could be both art and utility, and that every single thread matters. Many of her designs have fallen out of production, but several were recently reissued by the Finnish manufacturer Lapuan Kankurit, among them tablecloths woven with Jung’s iconic “100 Roses” pattern (from $348) or with “Play of Lines” ’s traced-out spiky triangles (from $441). Alternatively, you can find plenty of vintage out there, at thrillingly reasonable prices—such as this “Timber” pattern tablecloth ($86) or a “Princesses” tea towel ($25), which would look awfully nice in a frame. (N.B.: A fascination with Dora Jung is a natural complement to an Eva Zeisel fixation, if you happen to know someone who is already down that particular road.)

Placemats, Please

Plaid placemats 

$32

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I love a well-dressed table, but all the fabric and fuss of a full-on tablecloth can be an ordeal, especially if your dining table (like mine) serves multiple household roles in the course of a day: mail tray, work surface, grocery triage station, etc. Rather than dramatically sweeping all the crap off every four to six hours just to lay down a lovely large piece of fabric, I prefer to enliven my table with placemats. These little rectangles offer the perfect dose of wit and elegance and color; they’re quick to drop down, quick to pick up, and chic as all get-out. For fancy dinners and special occasions, I adore Misette’s embroidered ones with colorful squiggles ($260 for a set of four) or a more austere and graphical vintage set bearing Jacquard peacocks ($95 for four) from the aforementioned Dora Jung. For a daily jolt of joy, I recommend these polychromatic plaid placemats ($32 each; also available in yellow!) from Block Shop Textiles—easy on, easy off, easy delight.

Garum? I Barely Know ’Em!

Fermented-fish sauce 

$25

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The funky fermented-fish sauce that provided umami to the cuisine of ancient Rome is having a fresh moment, I’m so happy to say. A zingy, amber-hued concoction made from fermented fish intestines, salt, and time, it functions like Vietnamese nuoc mam or Thai nam pla, and the process by which it’s made is more or less identical to those across other cultures, involving the enzymatic breakdown of fish proteins into glutamates whether you’re in Pompeii or Phu Quoc. Garum’s recent resurgence, part of the culinary world’s ongoing fermentation renaissance, has led to all sorts of fascinating experimentation among chefs and home-kitchen mad scientists. I’m a big fan of the version produced by Maine Garum Co., which partners with fisheries in the state to turn eel and other seafood by-product (what the company evocatively describes as “the rejects, trim, bones, and viscera left behind”) into liquid bronze. A six-ounce bottle of this magical, magnetic stuff will run you $25 or, for a truly worthy recipient, pick up a 1.5-litre “Big Boy” of the juice for $99. (For any non-meat-eaters in your life in need of a bit of a savory boost, Noma Labs—yes, that Noma—sells a mushroom garum for $25 with a wonderfully husky complexity.)

Let Us Now Feel Aesthetically Conflicted About Eating Animals

It is perhaps outside the conventional scope of a holiday gift guide to philosophize on the consequences of human hegemony over all other life on Earth. It is not exactly fun or festive to think about the fact that, as the biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote, “in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches,” or that, in our age of maximally efficient factory farming, wild mammals make up only four per cent of the total number of mammals on land. But there is a sobering beauty in this set of carved-wood animal blocks ($83, ships to the U.S.), designed by the artist Johan Olin, in which each species is sized according to the relative proportion of its population. Look at those tiny crocodiles! So cute! Also extremely upsetting.

Knives Out

A knife made of carbon steel, rather than typical stainless steel, can attain terrifying sharpness and retain a magnificently honed edge seemingly forever, so long as it’s well taken care of. If the knife person in your life doesn’t have a carbon-steel blade already, the Japanese knifemaker Misono’s Swedish Carbon Gyuto ($125 for the twenty-one-centimetre blade) is a perfect start. If the knife person in your life does have one (and you’ll know, because they never shut up about it), get them a care kit: a rust eraser ($9); an if-you-know-you-know polishing cloth from Fabulustre ($13), pre-treated with anti-tarnish solution; and a little bottle of camellia oil ($12), for keeping things silky. Maybe also add a little note telling them not to get too persnickety about insuring the blade is mirror-shiny all the time. What I love most about my carbon-steel knife is the constellation of spots and stains that have accumulated on the blade, a visual record of time and care and labor.

Knives Out, But Slightly More Chill About It

You don’t need to be a knife person to appreciate a little blade, especially if it’s a really fun one, like this clever picnic knife from Opinel ($40), which can also transform into a fork or a spoon. Another great option is a classic mushroom-forager’s knife ($30), double-ended, with a folding blade on one side and a gentle dirt brush on the other. Scissors, too, are an essential part of any cutting kit: I love Joyce Chen’s colorful kitchen snippers ($36, in a range of hues), which are perfect for snipping herbs and twine, and I think every refrigerator-owning person I know needs a little set of scissors that looks like a daikon or a carrot ($8 each), with a handy magnet in the cover for sticking right where it’ll be most useful.

If You Want to Gift Two Thousand of Something

Tatung rice cooker and steamer 

$250

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Like roughly three quarters of humanity, I am obsessed with rice. There’s beauteous simplicity to a pot of ordinary grains made with the most minimal of tools. There are also so many worthy ways to gild the ritual, starting with the rice itself. I love Golden Queen’s spectacular short-grain variety ($26 for a five-pound bag), which is grown in Korea and then freshly milled to order in New York; its customers include fancy-pants restaurants such as Atomix. Elevate the act of washing rice with this ingenius “3-Ways” rinsing bowl ($38), whose clever angled design allows you to soak, rinse, and drain all in the same vessel. For steaming the grains to an ideal fluffy-stickiness, the Taiwanese electronics brand Tatung makes a beautiful, retro-chic, steely-shiny electric rice cooker ($250, also available in apple green and cheery red), which has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteen-sixties. Throw in a bottle of artisanal soy sauce ($19 for five hundred millilitres) from the cookbook author Clarissa Wei’s new brand, Heydoh, for your recipient to drizzle on their perfect, and perfected, rice.

Fruit Fantasia

Chocolate-dipped fruits 

$139.95

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Earlier this year, I received a gift—from myself, for me, because I wanted it—of a large box of chocolate-dipped fruit from the California confectioner Compartés ($140), and I am now utterly devoted to giving the same gift to others. There’s something intensely satisfying about the way the pieces of fruit are nestled together mosaically in their container, the way jewel-like slivers of apricot or sultry curves of orange peek out from their chocolate shells. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever given or received, and the rare gift that feels truly universal, equally fitting for the hard-to-shop-for, the distant relative, or the intimately beloved.

Spendy Suds

My favorite authority on dishwashing, the late Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh, recommended cultivating mindfulness while performing the chore: “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes, and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.” If we are always rushing to get the job over with, rather than relishing the moment, he explained, then we are letting ourselves be “sucked away into the future.” I don’t expect your loved ones to enjoy dishwashing any more than I do, but maybe an utterly over-the-top bottle of bergamot-scented dishwashing liquid from the storied parfumerie Astier de Villatte ($45 for five hundred millilitres) would ground them in the miracle of the here and now.♦

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Madhuri Vijay reads her story “Lara’s Theme,” from the November 24, 2025, issue of the magazine. Vijay is the author of the novel “The Far Field,” which won India’s J.C.B. Prize for Literature in 2019. She is at work on her second novel.

That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start.

“Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear,” she announced one evening.

“Wonderful,” my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we’d return to school.

I must have said something similarly vague and admiring. But Tarun said only, “Denim.”

“What?” I asked.

“De Nîmes. Means ‘from Nîmes.’ Well, technically, it’s serge de Nîmes, which was a type of cloth from there. Anyway, it’s French.”

Nobody asked how he knew this. Tarun was the brilliant one in our family, always first in his class, though he appeared never to study. I was three years younger, and my parents silently rejoiced if I brought home anything over a sixty per cent.

“That’s right,” my mother said, aligning herself with Tarun as usual. “English has lots of French words. Aurélie gave us a list.”

“English has lots of Indian words, too,” my father said.

“Not as many as French,” she declared, but I saw her glance at Tarun for confirmation.

“Bungalow,” my father countered. “Catamaran. Cummerbund.”

“Toddy,” Tarun added helpfully. “Ganja.”

“Tarun,” my father warned.

“Just saying. We have all the good ones.” Tarun tossed aside a notebook with a flourish. My father smiled and returned to his plans.

“Anyway,” my mother said uncertainly. Since I was the only one still listening, she addressed me: “Aurélie says if I keep it up, I’ll become fluent. Can you imagine, Kushal? Me, fluent in French?” She giggled. “I must be crazy.”

Nobody believed that my mother would keep it up. French was just the latest in a long line of hobbies, none of which had lasted more than six months. Before French, there had been Tanjore painting, bonsai, orchids, and, for three unfortunate weeks, horseback riding.

Each of her passions ran the same course. A flowering of enthusiasm was followed by a period of monkish devotion, during which our house filled with the paraphernalia of her pursuit: clippers and tortured shrubs; gold foil and pots of flesh-colored clay; orchids flaunting their shameless centers. But sooner or later she descended into boredom and impatience, and, one morning, Tarun and I would wake to find the house scrubbed of all signs of the recent hobby, as though the clippers and clay-caked brushes were painful evidence of a former lover which needed to be quickly erased. For a while after that, our mother would be subdued, confining herself to household chores. Then something else would catch her interest, and the cycle would begin anew: the bloom of love, the roar, the fall. And beneath it, like a subterranean stream, ran the refrain, the murmured self-reproach, “I must be crazy.”

Crazy. My mother’s deepest hope covering her darkest fear. Her only way of indicating that she was not like every other housewife of her class and station, packing her kids’ lunches and grousing about her husband. I must be crazy. Not even Tarun dared to disagree.

Tarun and I weren’t close as brothers. At home, it was usually my mother and Tarun joking around, my father amiably playing the straight man, and me watching. A born fence-sitter, Tarun called me. “How’s the bum, Kushal?” he’d ask out of nowhere. “Need an ice pack?”

At school, our paths rarely crossed, though stories floated down the corridors to me: how he’d bested the Hindi teacher with the garish ties or pulled some genius prank. His classmates mostly adored him; those who didn’t were discreet about it. Older girls occasionally cornered me on the playground, ruffling my hair and calling me silly names. I suffered their attentions, but I never did what they wanted, which was to mention them to Tarun. As far as I knew, despite his popularity, he’d never had a girlfriend.

At the end of each year, the students in the class below his were desperate to acquire his notebooks, as if they contained a special essence that others might absorb. Tarun laughed at this and, to their horror, gave his books to the kabadi-wallah for recycling. “Oh, please,” I heard him say to more than one supplicant. “If you want notes, ask that Kavitha. She copies down everything, even the teachers’ farts.”

Kavitha was a girl in his class, tall and pale, with waist-length braids and a grumpy manner. It was rumored that her father made her study six hours a day, but she still came in second to Tarun. I sometimes saw her during lunch, sitting outside the cycle shed, her head bent over a textbook, alone.

The only activity Tarun and I shared was a bit odd. After dinner, we’d hang out on our rooftop terrace, the bare concrete slab where our mother had once made a short-lived attempt at beekeeping. Most of the time, we’d sit around, not talking, but one day I found Tarun up there wearing a black motorcycle helmet. Our family didn’t own a motorcycle. He kept lowering and raising the visor, each time pulling a different face. It made me laugh, and, after that, the helmet started to appear regularly. Then came the night when he said, “Hit me.”

“What?” I asked.

“Let’s see how strong you are.”

I nudged the helmet. “Harder,” Tarun’s muffled voice said. I obeyed. His head barely moved.

“That’s it?” he said, mocking me.

I hit him so hard my palm stung.

He flipped the visor up, grinning. “Not bad, Kushal.”

Soon it became our ritual, albeit one we never mentioned to our parents. Once or twice a week, we’d go up to the terrace, Tarun would wear the helmet, and I’d hit him until my arm was numb.

Unlike my mother, my father had no hobbies. I liked this about him. A man without shadows, that was how I saw him. But, two months after my mother took up French, a mysterious package arrived for him from abroad. He leapt upon it, ripping back the cardboard to reveal a slim burgundy case. He raised the lid, and, over his shoulder, we saw the glitter of gold.

It was an alto saxophone, he explained. And then he told us a story I’d never heard before. As children, my father and his three older brothers had been allowed by my grandfather, a famously strict man, to play any musical instrument they wanted, so long as they gave it up at age fourteen to focus on their studies. Each boy would wake up on his fourteenth birthday to find that his instrument—piano, violin, veena—had vanished from the house. My father had watched this happen three times, but, as the youngest and his father’s favorite, he believed that he’d be spared. He wasn’t.

As an adult, my father told us, he’d considered taking saxophone classes again, but he worried that he’d passed the age when he’d be able to develop real proficiency. That didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t need to be Coltrane. He just wanted to play.

“Damn,” Tarun said, after a long silence. “Childhood dreams realized. Impressive, Pa.” Despite the edge of sarcasm in his voice, he was being sincere.

My father glowed.

My mother cleared her throat. “Saxophone classes?” she asked. “With whom?”

Then my father revealed his second secret. He’d found a teacher, a Syrian Christian jazz musician named Tony Chandy. In fact, he’d been to Tony’s place for three classes already. Tony was the one who’d told him that he needed to buy his own saxophone and had put him in touch with a place in Hamburg that sold secondhand instruments.

“Play something,” Tarun said.

My father demurred a little before producing a box of slender wooden reeds. He lifted the saxophone from its case and laboriously inserted one into the mouthpiece. Then he did a bizarre ducklike thing with his lips, simultaneously pursing and widening them.

“You’ll appreciate this,” he said to my mother. “The mouth position you use to play the saxophone is an embouchure. That’s French.”

My mother didn’t respond. Then she said, “Aum-boo-shure.”

My father did the ducklike thing again and blew three unsteady notes. I clapped.

“Thanks, Kushal.” He smiled. “You should hear Tony play someday. The music just pours out of his skin.”

“Sounds painful,” Tarun remarked.

My mother promptly rushed into the opening he’d created: “Yes, like a medical problem.”

“Doctor, help!” Tarun clutched himself. “I’m leaking arpeggios everywhere!”

My mother laughed. But my father, who ordinarily would have joined in their banter, stopped smiling. “My classes with Tony are on Saturdays,” he announced.

He lowered his saxophone into the case and clicked it shut. That evening, I heard him practicing in his bedroom, scales at first, then a melody I didn’t know, sad and hauntingly beautiful despite his inept playing, the notes starting, stopping, starting again.

My father, it turned out, was serious about the saxophone. He practiced for an hour every night, ending each session with that same sad melody. It was a complex tune with many swoops and feints, and I often found myself humming it when I was supposed to be studying. Midterm tests were approaching, though mine were inconsequential, compared with Tarun’s. He was in the twelfth standard, and in March he’d write his board exams, which would determine his future. My parents, opposites in every other way, were united in their complacency on this subject. There was no doubt in their minds that Tarun would do brilliantly.

They might have worried more had they not been occupied with troubles of their own. My mother had thus far been silent about my father’s gleaming new companion, but beneath that silence was anger. It was not her husband’s job to be crazy. It was hers. Yet my father had the unmistakable sheen of madness, didn’t he, when he practiced his scales, going up and down like a man possessed? He was audible from every corner of the house. I could even hear him from the terrace as I whacked on Tarun’s helmet, and I dreaded the moment when he would begin the haunting melody, which never failed to defeat him. He stumbled in the same places every time. After each mistake, there’d be a long, aggrieved pause before he picked up exactly where he’d left off.

One night, I began matching the rhythm of my blows on Tarun’s helmet to my father’s playing. I can’t say why. I knew the song by then, and maybe I believed that I could carry him through the tricky parts with sheer bodily force. Miraculously, it worked. He charged to the end, and I heard a startled silence from downstairs, as if he couldn’t believe it, either. My fingers were cramping in pain. I’d never hit Tarun so hard before.

I would likely have forgotten this episode entirely if our midterm results hadn’t come back a week later, revealing that, for the first time, Tarun had not topped his class. His marks were good, they were admirable, but they were not excellent. My parents were so shocked that neither of them reacted visibly. Tarun, for his part, presented his failure with an air of smug challenge—Go on, act like other parents, scream, punish me—and that silenced them. He’d never got less than an eighty-five per cent on any exam, yet there it was, like a blight: seventy-eight in chemistry, seventy-six in physics, and eighty in his best subject, maths.

As for me, I stopped visiting the terrace after that, because I’d realized what nobody else had, which was that Tarun’s results were my fault. I’d gone too far. I’d hit him too hard. I, with my thirteen-year-old fists, had broken my brother’s impeccable mind. I don’t know if Tarun was hurt by my desertion. He never said anything. He didn’t appear to be studying any harder, either. Kavitha, the girl with the braids, had come in first; Tarun had placed third.

In my memory, the next two events overlap like fish scales. The first was that I met Tony Chandy. My father had been nagging Tarun and me to accompany him to a lesson, perhaps hoping that we might be inspired to take up an instrument, too. He was getting better, though he had not managed to play the haunting melody the whole way through again since that night.

“Not my thing, Kenny G” was Tarun’s blunt response.

“What about you, Kushal?” my father asked.

I could feel Tarun and my mother watching me. My mother’s look was easy to decode. Already she was becoming bored of French, but she would not allow my father’s devotion to exceed hers, so she was hanging on, intoning verbs, grimly filling out worksheets. If I agreed to accompany my father, it would be a blow to her ego, but she would recover. Tarun’s look was more complicated. In it lay both a question about who I was, exactly, this smaller, fence-sitting version of himself, and some other question, which I could not articulate.

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

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“O.K., Pa,” I said. “Whatever.”

I could almost hear my brother smile.

On a cool Saturday in December, my father and I drove to Tony Chandy’s house. On the way, he told me about his teacher. Tony Chandy had had no formal training, but his talent was such that the Dalai Lama had once visited Bangalore just to hear him play. Tony had received offers from famous Bollywood directors to compose scores for their films, but he had turned them all down. Many of Tony’s students had gone on to attend fancy music schools like Juilliard but swore that Tony had already taught them everything they needed to know.

Despite my suspicion that the source of this biography was none other than Tony Chandy himself, I found myself becoming excited. So it was a shock to discover that the Maestro lived in a broken-down bungalow tucked into a filthy gully in Cox Town. Next door was a chicken shop with a wall of shit-crusted cages, each stuffed with a dozen slowly dying birds. One had no beak, only a crimson pucker between its dark-bright eyes. I was glad that my father didn’t ring Tony’s bell, just opened the door and walked in. “Sometimes Tony doesn’t hear,” he explained. “His health isn’t good.”

A deaf saxophone teacher didn’t sound promising, but I followed my father down a dim hall, past a sour-smelling kitchen, and into a back room. Here, I saw a divan with a saxophone lying on rumpled sheets, a file cabinet overflowing with scores, and, finally, Tony Chandy himself, a skinny figure in a T-shirt and track pants, smoking in a chair by the window.

“Morning, Tony!” my father called. “This is Kushal, my son. He wanted to see where the magic happens.”

Tony looked at me. “He did, did he?”

His eyes had an unnerving quality, not unlike those of the dying chickens next door. My father hastily added that it was Tony’s magic he was referring to, not his own. Tony nodded, losing interest. “Sit down, Magic,” he said to me. To my father: “Figure out that B minor?”

I sat on the divan while my father assembled his instrument. I hadn’t seen him do it in weeks and was amazed. He was like an assassin loading a rifle. He tightened the reed and stood ready.

“Go on,” Tony said, still smoking.

My father played a scale. He didn’t look at me. Neither did Tony. I got the impression that he wasn’t listening at all, or he was listening so carefully that it looked like he was asleep. When my father finished, Tony said, “Now the rest.”

My father played his scales, and Tony remained comatose. At the end, he said, “Your embouchure is still forced. Relax.” He said embouchure as my mother had, but it sounded natural coming from him. “Let’s move on.”

My father nodded, looking relieved. From his bag, he drew a sheaf of papers and placed them on a music stand. I read the title on the top page: “Lara’s Theme.” Even before he began, I knew it was the tune I’d been hearing all those evenings, the melody that soared but never stayed high, that plunged but never stayed low, that seemed to hold winter in its notes.

My father started and immediately made a mistake. Tony Chandy’s face twitched. My father restarted and made another mistake. And then Tony did something extraordinary. He reached his cigarette out and touched my father on his bare forearm. It lasted less than a second—I don’t think the tip made contact with his skin—but I smelled singed hair. To my astonishment, my father did not react.

“Again,” Tony said.

My father obeyed. This time, he made it almost all the way through. I saw his nostrils flare as he approached a grapelike cluster of notes; he let out a despairing honk before stopping. Again, Tony reached out with his cigarette. Again, I smelled my father’s hair burning.

What would Tarun have said if he’d been there? Likely something witty and cruel that reduced Tony Chandy to what he was: a bitter, small-time musician living in near-poverty, spending his final years giving lessons to hapless middle-aged men. But I wasn’t Tarun. Instead, I wondered why my father had brought me here. Had he known that this would happen? Was he teaching me an obscure lesson about devotion, the price you had to pay for excellence? Or was he as shocked as I was?

Tony Chandy did not burn my father again. My father played for another forty minutes; he made many mistakes, and Tony patiently corrected them. At one point, Tony picked up his own saxophone and played a line, and I heard what my father had promised. The music did not come from Tony’s instrument. It came from his skin.

We didn’t talk on the way home. But once we were parked in front of our house my father said, “Whatever you want to do in life, Kushal, it’s O.K. with me. As long as you’re serious about it.”

“That song,” I said, ignoring him, “it’s called ‘Lara’s Theme’?”

“Yes.” He sounded thankful not to have to finish his lecture. “It’s from an old film.”

“Which one?”

“ ‘Doctor Zhivago.’ ”

“What’s it about?”

“Never watched it.” He gave me a wan smile. “But I’m pretty sure it’s a sad story.”

The second thing that happened was that Tarun got a girlfriend. Over dinner, he announced to my parents that he and Kavitha were going around together.

“Kavitha?” my mother asked in surprise. “The girl in your class?”

“The one who beat—” my father started. “The one who’s good at her studies?”

“That’s the one.” Tarun cocked his head slyly. “Hang on, do you have a problem with this boyfriend-girlfriend shit? I didn’t think you were those kind of parents, but—”

“We’re not,” my mother said quickly. “We don’t have a problem with it.”

My father was slower to respond. “What about her parents?”

Tarun’s face darkened. “She isn’t telling them. Her dad—cover your ears, Kushal—is a fucking psycho. She told me he forces her to study five, six hours a day. And once, when she watched TV for two minutes longer than he gave her permission for, he cut the TV cable. With a knife.”

I looked at my parents’ faces, which were softening. My father was surely thinking of the iron fist of his own father; my mother, perhaps, of the things that girls were and weren’t allowed to do. I saw them glance at each other, and I knew they’d agreed.

“It’s fine with us if you want to have a relationship, Tarun,” my father said. “But your boards are coming up, and you should also be—”

“Of course, Pa,” Tarun said, magnanimous now that he’d won. “We’ll spend most of our time studying. Oh,” he added, “I invited her here tomorrow.”

The next afternoon, Kavitha arrived. Her hair was in the braids I remembered from school, but, instead of her uniform, she wore a yellow kurta over jeans that even I could tell didn’t fit her well. She stomped into our house, dropped onto our sofa, and barely looked at any of us, including Tarun.

My mother had not touched her French worksheets that morning. She’d woken up buzzing with some new energy and spent an hour grilling Tarun about Kavitha and her preferences. I did not understand this singular interest until Kavitha was sitting down, backpack between her feet, and my mother came sailing out of the kitchen with a dozen triangular sandwiches arranged on a platter in a dainty whorl.

“I heard you love cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches,” she informed Kavitha brightly.

“Oh,” Kavitha said. She picked up a triangle but didn’t eat it.

“Your hair is so beautiful,” my mother murmured. “Do you use shikakai?”

“No, Aunty.”

“What do you use?”

“Shampoo, Aunty.”

“Which one?”

“Sunsilk, Aunty.”

“Well, I’ll have to try it!” my mother exclaimed. “You’re a walking advertisement!”

It was a dreadful thing to watch, my mother fussing over this gruff, gangly girl as she clung to her scrap of bread and cheese. At first, I thought she was trying to put Kavitha at ease, but Kavitha wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be put at ease. She carried herself like Yudhishthira in his chariot, always hovering an inch off the ground.

Then I recalled Tarun’s story about the knife and the severed TV cable, and I suddenly understood what I was seeing. It was the bloom. My mother had found her next obsession. There it was, sitting on her sofa, bread crumbs falling like snow onto its yellow kurta.

Goodbye to French, I thought.

My father asked Kavitha about her college plans. She turned to him and spoke intensely about studying engineering, after which she intended to work for five to seven years before getting her M.B.A. Tarun listened with a tiny, ironic smile I’d never seen on him. Then he said, “Stop pestering her, you two. Come, Kavi, let’s go upstairs.”

Kavitha’s head shot up, as if she’d never been called Kavi or told to come by anyone. She rose, tripped on her bag, recovered, and followed Tarun upstairs.

“Nice girl,” my father whispered. “Bit on the shy side, maybe.”

“Well, what do you expect?” my mother hissed back. “With a father like that.”

An hour later, I passed Tarun’s room on my way to our shared bathroom. His door was ajar. One of his long, denim-clad legs hung over the side of his bed. In a lordly British accent, he was saying, “Pray tell, what is the Grignard reaction, milady?” I couldn’t see Kavitha’s face, so I wasn’t sure whether she was smiling. But, when she answered, it was in her own ordinary voice.

January passed. Kavitha started to spend more time at our house, and my mother remained firmly effusive about her. “Such a lovely girl, so mature,” she’d say, an assessment vibrating with a darkness that had everything to do, I knew, with the knife-wielding father lurking in the background.

She’d tried to ask Kavitha leading questions about her family, but the girl proved disappointingly unforthcoming. Her father worked for a tire manufacturer. Her mother baked and sold cakes. My mother trilled vapidly over these mundane facts.

The French books still made an occasional appearance, but mainly, I noticed, when Kavitha was around. My mother would read a sentence aloud, then translate it. Tarun would tease her, and my mother would look sorrowfully toward Kavitha, as if the two of them now shared some womanly burden. Kavitha never responded to these looks. Then she and Tarun would go upstairs to study.

Something else I noticed: the door to Tarun’s bedroom closed a little more each day. Then one day it was locked, and my mother, trimming more cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches downstairs, had no idea. I listened at the door, and what I heard made me quickly walk away.

It was my mother’s idea that Tarun take Kavitha out for Valentine’s Day. She looked up movie listings in the paper. She suggested brownie fudge sundaes at Corner House. What about bowling? Would Kavitha like that? She became so single-minded that my father stepped in.

“Leave him, poor fellow,” he said. “If he and Kavitha want to go out, they can organize it themselves. Anyway, they have—what?—a month left before boards? They need to concentrate.”

“Don’t talk to me about concentration,” she snapped.

“What?”

“Every night, the same song. How is anyone supposed to concentrate on anything?”

He frowned. “Tony says I have to practice.”

“Why?” she jeered. “Are you and Tony going on a world tour?”

On any other day, Tarun would have offered a quip of his own, the two of them would have performed their mocking duet, but on that day he gave her nothing. He just stood there, wearing the ironic smile I’d noticed the day Kavitha first visited. When she realized that he wouldn’t back her, she whirled to face me. “Did you hear, Kushal?” she cried. “Your father’s going to be a famous musician!”

I thought of the smell of my father’s burned arm hair. I thought of the ghosts of my mother’s former passions. And, for a brief, vivid moment, I despised them both.

I didn’t respond, and the moment passed. My father drove to a barber’s appointment. My mother went into the kitchen. Tarun strolled upstairs, whistling. This is why I was the only one in the living room when the phone rang and a woman asked for my father. I said he’d gone out. She introduced herself as Radhika Garg, the director of the Bangalore School of Music. My first, bewildered thought was that my mother had been right: my father was going to be a famous musician.

Radhika Garg apologized for bothering us, but she was notifying all of Tony Chandy’s current and former students. Tony had died late the night before, of heart failure. The funeral would be held at ten the following morning, in Mar Thoma Church. We were welcome to attend.

Buried within every family, perhaps, is the secret desire to self-destruct, to push intimacy to its ugliest extremes. What else could explain the fact that we all decided to go to Tony Chandy’s funeral? We reached Mar Thoma at the same time as Tony’s coffin. We filed into the church behind it and took a seat on a pew in the back. I’d never been to a Christian funeral before. I had the idea that it would be holy and hushed, but the church was filled with a low chatter.

A white-robed priest climbed to the pulpit and prayed for a long time in Malayalam. Other people got up and spoke. The last was Radhika Garg, who turned out to be a large woman in a purple sari and matching lipstick. She said that Tony was that rarest of things: a true artist. Next to me, I felt my father nod. Tony could have lived a different kind of life, she went on. He could have turned his prodigious talent to riches, but instead he chose to teach. He loved teaching. Everything he did sprang from that love.

I tried to reconcile this noble portrait with the man I’d met, whose comments on my father’s playing had not seemed to spring from anything other than mild irritation. What had my father seen in him that I had not? Sitting in that church, buttocks aching from the hard pew, I felt very young, incapable of understanding the first thing about the world. I sneaked a look at Tarun. He was listening to Radhika Garg with his newly adopted smirk, and I realized, with a shock not devoid of pleasure, that my brilliant older brother didn’t understand the first thing about the world, either.

Radhika Garg bent to the microphone and invited to the pulpit anyone else who wanted to say a few words. My father raised his hand.

“Please,” Radhika Garg said. “Come.”

My father slid his saxophone case from under the pew. I had been so distracted by Tony’s coffin that I had not noticed him carry it in. He squeezed past Tarun and me into the aisle and walked respectfully around the coffin before climbing the dais. A ripple of anticipation went through the crowd as people understood that they were about to be treated to the music Tony had loved.

My father put the strap around his neck and looked out at the mourners. “Tony was my teacher,” he said simply. Then he raised the saxophone to his lips.

What else could he have played? As far as I knew, Tony had taught him no other song. The first notes of “Lara’s Theme” emerged, and my skin prickled. He sounded good. He was playing it under tempo, almost dragging it, but the notes were sure, and the melancholy of the composition spread over the gathering like a fog. I heard a gasp, a few smothered sobs. I glanced at my mother. She seemed to be made of stone.

My father closed his eyes and played for his dead teacher. He played calmly and slowly, and I knew that he was determined, one way or another, to reach the end. Then, like a skydiver, he flung himself into the difficult part, the soaring, operatic part that had always undone him.

His finger slipped. The note was so wrong that my teeth hurt.

He stopped, blinking. Then he picked up where he’d left off. Seconds later, another dreadful mistake. Someone groaned.

Silently, I pleaded with him to give up, or at least to make light of his ineptitude with a joke, the kind that Tarun or my mother would have made, but he remained utterly, grotesquely sincere. He attacked that song from every angle, and, at the end, he blasted the final note, which tore like a ligament, but I don’t think he even heard it. He was already on his knees before Tony’s coffin, dismantling his golden weapon.

We did not wait to see Tony deposited into the van that would take him to the cemetery. Instead, we walked silently back to our car. My father placed his saxophone in the trunk, and we all got in. Then my mother turned to him. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

She meant it. Anyone could see that she meant it. Her hand went out to touch his arm, but he recoiled. When he spoke, it was with a malevolence I’d never heard from him.

“Tell me something,” he said. “What exactly do you plan to do with your French, hmm? Impress the boys’ friends? Order wine in a fancy restaurant? Become a tour guide for snooty French tourists, say, ‘This is Cubbon Park, oo-la-la, have you tasted Brie?’ That’s your big dream?”

Her body went eerily still. My father stared straight ahead through the windshield.

“See?” he said with disgusted satisfaction. “I can do it, too.”

I no longer recall what Tarun and Kavitha did for Valentine’s Day, but soon it was late February, and Tarun needed a suit for his graduation. He, naturally, had been chosen to give the valedictorian’s speech. My mother took him to a suit shop, and he modelled his choice for us that evening.

“Very handsome,” my father said. He sounded warm and sad. “My grownup son.” He and my mother had brokered a tentative peace, their hostility put aside for the sake of Tarun’s boards, which he would take in two weeks. My father had not touched his saxophone since Tony’s funeral.

“What’s Kavitha wearing?” my mother asked.

“A sari, I guess.” Tarun shrugged. “The girls all wear white saris. Bit widow-y, if you ask me.”

My mother did not contribute a joke of her own, but she looked thoughtful. The next time Kavitha came over, my mother casually asked her whether she’d found her white sari yet. Kavitha shook her head.

“Wait here.” My mother went upstairs and came down shortly afterward, holding a flat box.

It was a white chiffon sari, an ethereal cloud studded with twinkling sequins. I couldn’t think of anything less appropriate for Kavitha, who should have worn thick, sensible silk, as rigid as armor.

“I happened to see this in a shop yesterday,” my mother gushed. “And I thought, Oh, this would be absolutely perfect for Kavi!”

The lie drooped. I could see her in the shop, tapping her finger on the counter. Show me everything you have in white.

Kavitha gazed at the cloud. “Thanks, Aunty.”

“You’re so welcome!” My mother sighed happily. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I must be crazy. But I just couldn’t resist!”

Dusk was falling when we arrived at the school grounds, where rows of chairs had been set up under the open sky. Tarun, his speech folded in his suit pocket, peeled away from us to greet his friends, and my parents stood around, chatting to other parents they remembered from past school events.

I found a group of kids my age, all younger siblings of graduates, and we decided to sneak into the school building. We wandered down empty corridors, poked our heads into dark, echoing classrooms. We tried the door to the headmaster’s office, but it was locked. One by one, the others left to join their families, until I found myself alone with a plump boy who eyed me sideways. “Can you keep your mouth shut?” he asked, before producing a small bottle of rum. He threw back his head and drank ostentatiously, though I could tell that little actually passed his lips. He held the bottle out to me.

The first sip set my mouth on fire, then mellowed into an almost incredible warmth. I took a second sip, then a third. He reached for the bottle, but I fended him off and sipped again. “Hey!” he cried in alarm. “Are you crazy?” He snatched the bottle from my hand and ran out.

I was walking back to find my parents when I saw Kavitha, who’d just arrived. She was dressed in a modest off-white silk sari with a thick gold border, its lines as pristine as those in a new notebook. It suited her perfectly. She was with her parents, who were both shorter than her. Her mother wore an orange sari and carried a plastic bag instead of a purse. Her father wore an unremarkable shirt and pants.

Kavitha saw me, and I waved to her. She did not wave back.

I found my parents in their seats. My father was having trouble with his camera lens, and my mother was helping. Maybe it was the heat of the rum in my belly, but my parents’ edges seemed softened. My mother teased my father about the camera, which was very old. My father feigned offense. They giggled, then looked embarrassed. Yes, they were happy that night. Their brilliant boy was graduating.

The lights went out. In the darkness, the school choir sang something soft and incantatory. The headmaster climbed onto the stage and lighted a tall brass oil lamp. Then I saw Tarun, an unlit candle in his hands, walking toward him. He held his candle to the lamp, then walked back down, cupping the tiny flame. He moved up the aisle, lighting the candle of the student at the end of each row. The flame was passed down, student to student, candle to candle. And then, on some prearranged signal, the graduates turned to face their families, a sea of light.

Tarun’s speech—self-effacing, funny, heartfelt—was a success. Afterward, the graduates, proudly holding their diplomas, posed for photos with their families. I’d never seen my father hug Tarun so many times. My mother looked as if she could not believe he existed. People kept coming up to congratulate them. My parents were suitably humble, but their eyes glittered with pride.

At some point, I turned away from this tableau to see three figures approaching. Kavitha and her parents. They were flanking her, all three marching in military lockstep.

Instantly, I knew something was wrong.

My father was the first to turn. I saw him adopt an expression of preëmptive modesty; he thought they were more well-wishers. Then he recognized Kavitha, and his look changed to one of genuine welcome, for he really did like her—he liked her seriousness, her lack of frivolity. My mother turned next, and she saw Kavitha’s sari before she saw her face. She looked hurt but smiled bravely. Tarun was posing for a photograph with two other girls and hadn’t seen Kavitha yet.

“You must be Kavitha’s parents,” my father said. “So nice to finally meet you. I’m Ashok. This is my wife, Tarini.”

“Hello,” Kavitha’s father said. He didn’t introduce himself or his wife.

“Beautiful ceremony, didn’t you think?” my mother asked. She turned to Kavitha. “That’s a lovely sari,” she said blandly. Kavitha, to her credit, didn’t flinch.

“We have an urgent matter to discuss with you,” Kavitha’s father said.

“Oh?” my father said.

“Your son—he is causing trouble,” Kavitha’s father said. “With our daughter.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“He is pulling her away from her studies. He is filling her head with nonsense.”

“Future lawyers, look to your left and then to your right. Two of you will be buried in government litigation and the third will run a yoga retreat for the other two.”

Cartoon by Lynn Hsu and Carol Lasky

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“Such as?” my mother asked.

“Telling her exams are useless. Telling her she should become a yoga teacher instead of an engineer. ‘Who needs another engineer?’ Things like this he’s saying to her.”

“Ah.” My father smiled, relaxing. “I’m sure he’s only joking, but—”

“He is not joking!” Kavitha’s father said loudly, and a dozen heads turned, including Tarun’s. Quickly, he detached himself from his friends and came to stand beside us. He did not greet Kavitha or her parents.

“Sorry, I don’t understand,” my father said. “Yes, Tarun and Kavitha have become friendly of late, but that’s not a bad thing. Tarun takes his studies very seriously, and I know Kavitha does, too.”

“She is not prepared for her exams because of him!” Kavitha’s father bellowed. “She has never scored below ninety per cent in any exam, but now she is struggling to even finish the portions!”

“I’m sure—” my father began.

Kavitha’s father turned to Tarun. “You are evil,” he growled. “An evil person.”

At this, my parents seemed to grow in stature on either side of us until they loomed like dark, threatening mountains. But Tarun spoke before they could.

“I never said anything like that to Kavitha, Uncle,” he said coolly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve studied together a few times, that’s all.”

“A few times?” Kavitha’s father sputtered. “You forced her to come to your house every day! And not only that. You forced her to do other things. Dirty things! She has confessed everything!”

“I didn’t force her to do anything, Uncle,” Tarun said. “And I don’t know what she told you, but it was only a few times. Three, maybe four, wouldn’t you say?” He looked at my mother, who held his gaze for a prolonged second, then murmured, “Three, four. About that.”

I waited for my father to correct them, but he didn’t.

“Honestly, Uncle, I’m not sure why I’d ask Kavitha to come to my house if not to study,” Tarun went on smoothly. “I mean, there’s no other possible reason, is there?”

This was breathtakingly cruel, even for Tarun, but it didn’t seem to register on Kavitha’s face. She just stood there, seemingly oblivious to the audience we’d attracted.

“You’re lying!” Kavitha’s father roared.

My father drew himself up. “That’s enough,” he said firmly. “My son has explained himself.”

To my alarm, Kavitha’s father spotted me. “You’re the brother, aren’t you?” he hissed. “Kavitha says you’re always there. She says you know.”

“Kushal?” My mother sounded worried. “What would he know?”

“The truth! He knows the truth!”

I could see my parents preparing to defend me, but I already knew what to do. “Yes, Uncle,” I answered. “I’m always there.”

Kavitha’s father suddenly looked hopeful. “And?”

“I heard them talking about the Grignard reaction,” I said. “That’s chemistry, I think.”

“What else?” he cried. “What else?”

“Nothing else, Uncle.”

We faced him down, shoulder to shoulder: Tarun, my mother, my father, me. We had bickered and sniped at one another all our lives, and it had taken Kavitha, cranky, inscrutable Kavitha, to shock us into this violent harmony. Never again would my family be so united as when we sacrificed, without a thought, this tall, lonely girl with her long braids.

“Good thing there’s no knife nearby, hmm?” my mother remarked.

And then, astoundingly, my father responded, “Too bad, because, if you ask me, it’s time we cut off this ridiculous conversation.”

Kavitha’s father’s eyes flickered from one to the other.

“What?” he said.

And something about the way he said it, some artless confusion, made me look sharply at Kavitha, who, to my surprise, was looking back at me. There was nothing in her expression to indicate that anything significant was happening. There was—how shall I describe it?—a room far back in her gaze in which she sat, indifferent, waiting for this storm to pass, as so many others had.

Kavitha’s father turned and stalked away. A second later, Kavitha followed him.

Kavitha’s mother, who hadn’t spoken a word, now reached into her plastic bag and pulled out a flat object. She thrust it at my mother, who lifted her hands a beat too late to receive it. The sari box fell to the ground, and a white cloud spread at our feet, twinkling.

It wasn’t just indifference I had seen on Kavitha’s face. It was something else, too. Call it curiosity, of a detached, scientific kind. The kind that might make someone accept a sari from a stranger. Or tell a story about a knife. Just to see what would happen. Either way, it would have nothing to do with her.

Tarun ended up performing fairly well on his boards, scoring eighty-seven per cent over all. But, the week after his results came out, he caused another uproar in our house by announcing that he was applying to universities in the United States. The deadline for most places had passed, but he’d done some research and found several that had rolling admission. He got into a small college in the state of Washington. The financial-aid package was generous, but he would need to work on campus for twenty hours a week to support himself, an idea he seemed to relish.

Tarun left Bangalore in late August. A month or so later, I went into his room. I saw the motorcycle helmet on a shelf in his cupboard but didn’t touch it. Instead, I stacked up his notebooks, which were scattered everywhere. At school the next day, I let it be known that Tarun’s notes were for sale, and by the end of the week I had six serious bidders. I sold his books for five thousand rupees, and with the money I paid an older neighborhood boy to supply me with bottles of rum, which I drank in secret sips for months. That year, I failed my exams in a spectacular fashion, pushing my parents to the verge of despair, but, before things could get really bad, the money ran out, and with it my desire for such swift, extravagant ruin. Looking back, I can see that I was never that serious about it. Some people are built for a quieter decay.

I was on 100 Feet Road last week, when I saw a woman entering the new Reebok showroom. Nine years had passed, but I recognized her immediately.

“Kushal,” she said when I walked in. “You look different.”

“You, too,” I said, and it was true. The braids were gone, and her hair was cut into a bob. It didn’t suit her face at all, but it did make her seem like another person, which may have been the point.

A salesgirl came up with an armful of boxes. “I have a race next month,” Kavitha explained.

“You’re a runner?” I asked.

“Marathons. It’s just a hobby, though. What about you? Are you working?”

“I’m in architecture,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I ferried plans about for my father, organized his schedule. I didn’t add that it was the only job I’d managed to keep for more than six months.

“What’s Tarun up to these days?” Kavitha asked.

“Not doing marathons, I promise you that.”

She laughed.

“Tarun’s all right,” I said. “He’s in the States now. Works in consulting.”

“And your parents? How are they?”

“They’re fine,” I said.

“Your dad was learning the sax, right?”

“Yes, but he stopped.”

“And your mom was learning French?”

“Yes, but she stopped, too.”

Kavitha laughed again. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her laugh before, and now she’d done it twice. While we talked, she tried on various shoes. After she chose a pair, I followed her to the payment counter. “So did you do your M.B.A.?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “Did it in Singapore, worked for a year, got burned out, and quit.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m getting certified as a dive instructor.”

“A what?”

“Scuba.”

“Fuck off, that’s cool,” I said sincerely, and she laughed again.

“I’ll take you on a dive someday,” she said. “You won’t believe how peaceful it is, Kushal. When you’re down there, nothing can touch you.”

She left with her shoes, and I went home. I didn’t tell my parents that I’d seen Kavitha. We ate dinner as usual. Then they settled on the sofa to watch TV, which they’d taken to doing for long hours before falling asleep. I went upstairs to Tarun’s bedroom and took out his old helmet. I put it on and lowered the visor. The world instantly retreated, turned dim and soft and harmless. You could have walked right up to me then and hit me with a brick. I wouldn’t have felt a thing. ♦

Your story “Lara’s Theme” is told from the point of view of the younger son in a family of four, in Bangalore, in the late nineties or early two-thousands. Kushal, who is thirteen, sees himself as the observer in a household full of big personalities; his older brother, Tarun, calls him a “fence-sitter.” It must be helpful for you as the author to have a narrator who can see what’s happening around him in a clear and neutral way. But is he truly neutral?

Kushal certainly has pretensions toward neutrality, even if he isn’t strictly neutral. This makes him an effective narrator, as you point out. But it’s the pride that Kushal takes in his neutrality that really interests me. I think he savors the idea that he exists at a remove from his family; it makes him feel unusual, even exceptional.

The irony being, of course, that everyone around Kushal is equally convinced of his or her own exceptionalism. Kushal’s mother takes great pains not to act like other mothers. Tarun’s academic excellence sets him apart from his peers. Kavitha, Tarun’s classmate, holds herself at arm’s length from the world. Even Kushal’s father tells a story about how he, growing up, felt himself to be distinct from his brothers.

Kushal’s mother goes from hobby to hobby—growing orchids, riding horses, studying French—all to, in a sense, justify her claim that she must be “crazy,” that she isn’t like the other housewives and mothers. Why do you think that is so important to her? Why does she need to stand out?

For the same reason we all do, I suppose. It’s that old, comforting fiction: I am nothing like the other members of my group; I am unique. Most of the time, this does as much for a person as the opposite comforting fiction—I am exactly like the other members of my group; I speak for all of us—might do. Kushal’s mother has chosen iconoclasm over group affinity, but she could easily have gone the other way and become the kind of person who starts every sentence with “As a mother . . .” Both extremes are as seductive as they are deficient, and either one would have failed her in the end.

Tarun is always effortlessly at the top of his class, and then, abruptly, he isn’t. Is he distracted by first love—falling for his classmate Kavitha—or is he rebelling against the role that he has played in his family, the pressure to live up to his parents’ expectations of him? Is Kavitha, in a way, a tool that he uses to extricate himself from the family dynamic?

Tarun is used to being the smartest one in any room, so when Kavitha unexpectedly beats him on an exam—this occurs, mind you, before they begin their relationship—he experiences the panic of the precocious child who has glimpsed a future in which precociousness is no longer enough to guarantee success. He takes up with Kavitha for a variety of murky reasons, one of which could very well be rebelling against his family. But also buried in there is a creeping fear that he may not turn out to be quite as brilliant as everyone has, all his life, assured him that he is. And perhaps there is something even uglier, such as a desire to sabotage and tear down this girl, who, through sheer, unglamorous hard work, has managed to outshine him.

The father eventually takes up a hobby of his own—playing the saxophone—and is dedicated but mediocre at it. Why do you think he pursues it so doggedly?

Kushal calls his father “a man without shadows,” but, of course, no such thing exists. Kushal’s father plays the steady counter to his wife’s volatile personality, but I do wonder whether he might not have stuck with the saxophone for so long if he didn’t believe that it was his duty to model perseverance for his sons—especially since his wife won’t do any such thing. Is this a purely admirable line of reasoning? Or is there something a touch self-congratulatory about it, as well?

Do you think that the father is aware of his own failings and those of his teacher, Tony Chandy, or is Tony perhaps not what he seems to Kushal?

Kushal and his father are both correct about Tony, I think. Kushal sees the grimy, pathetic side of him; his father sees the noble, tragic one. But, as I think your question implies, the father isn’t introspective enough to also see what his son sees, whereas, by the end, Kushal has sensed that there’s more to Tony than his limited perspective initially allowed him to see.

We were talking earlier about neutrality—perhaps this is all neutrality is. Not some perfect and unassailable view of the world but the occasional flicker of double vision, the brief, destabilizing reminder of other people’s minds, humming along in their baffling, alien ways.

What inspired you to imagine this family and their dynamic?

I’ve been lugging these people around in my head for so many years that I no longer recall where they came from. It seems to me now that they must have arrived complete. As did most elements of the story, to tell the truth: the French, the helmet, the rum, the saxophone, the graduation ceremony, the sari. But for the longest time I couldn’t make the elements fit. I was like that unshaven detective with bloodshot eyes, standing in front of a board pinned with clues, muttering to myself, “They’re all connected. But how?”

What I can say with certainty is that the story captures one of the most vivid and intense periods of my life: my last few years of high school, in Bangalore. The bulk of what Marguerite Yourcenar calls the “emotional storage” of a writer occurred for me in those years, and I’ve long wanted to write a story that pays tribute to them. But why it took this form, and not any other, is a mystery to me.

You are working on your second novel. Does “Lara’s Theme” relate to it, in any way?

Only in some of its themes and preoccupations, and the fact that both have taken me years to write. But, otherwise, the two projects are unrelated. “Lara’s Theme” was only ever meant to be a story. ♦

I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What I am abundantly interested in is resurrection, which means there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when well illuminated, I find myself hovering over with fascination, or a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, drew me right in.

There is no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great, but what makes her work compelling, and what most informs my own writing, is that Willis—The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic—was never afraid to be overtaken by unexpected delight, even if it came at the expense of some preëxisting skepticism. Those two traits—skepticism and the potential for pleasure—exist at the intersection of Las Vegas and Elvis, especially during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweat-drenched singer laboring through the hotel residencies of the subsequent decade, sluggishly dragging himself along for the sake of a paycheck.

The Elvis whom Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead but from a long stretch of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led to film roles and soundtrack recordings and away, largely, from the stage. The previous year had marked a turnaround: there was the triumph of his comeback special, which was shot in June and aired in December. But to prove that he was fully back would require conquering Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.

There’s a striking moment in her piece, a sort of mini-twist, when you can sense Willis’s mode of observation shift from bewilderment to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright enjoyment. It happens after Elvis arrives onstage, when Willis takes him in for the first time. She’s amazed by his new, slimmer physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also puzzled by his hair, dyed black and no longer slicked into the famous ducktail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to look younger, he’s not interested in performing as he did in his youth. She marvels at his playfulness, becomes fixated on his earnestness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied.” Although Willis herself was only twenty-seven—the magazine had hired her the previous year—she appreciated his maturation. “He knew better than to try to be nineteen again,” she notes. “He had quite enough to offer at thirty-three.”

Willis’s Elvis column embodies one of her central gifts: her ability to walk you through an unfamiliar tunnel and lead you out the other side, into a bracing light, as surprised as she is that the destination looks the way it does. That this piece is not especially long causes the aforementioned twist to land even more forcefully. This is a writer saying, “We don’t have much time, and I’m not trying to change your mind, but I’m allowing you to witness how I was moved from one place to another.”

Reading Willis’s review of Elvis as he is shocked back to life reminded me that my interest in the singer goes beyond resurrection. Elvis was among the earliest of what I think of as the blank-slate pop stars, a lineage of performers, encompassing more recent figures such as Taylor Swift, who are so infused with meaning, for so many, that they become a stand-in for grand emotions and concepts whether they believe in them or not. What fuelled Elvis’s stardom was that he could contain all the projections at once, and even cultivate them. It takes a sharp critical eye to capture an artist like that, to write not about what he means but about what he is doing. That work isn’t about stripping away the romance of a performer’s appeal. On the contrary, I find it deeply romantic. Willis gave herself over to the spectacle of an Elvis who was not yet finished, an artist who remained as alive as he’d ever been. ♦

Viva Las Vegas: Elvis Returns to the Stage

The King’s first concert at the International Hotel.